Like I said in one of the comment: "Fast boot is good, but not the most important thing. It's only part of user experience. No one will frequently reboot their machine." The goal of this project is not only to boot fast, but also operate fast, with better usability.

"The easier the interface, the more people will use it.", Chris Heilmann said that in a recent presentation. That's true, design IS the most important thing.Let me know if you have some feedback!

2009年4月13日 星期一

Thanks for your interest in xPUD, I'm very appreciated for all of the feedbacks and contributions! :-)

The main purpose of this project is to make a ready-to-use Linux target on a small selection of hardware and applications, and still make adding extra stuff possible. We want to focus on one thing and get it done in a better design.

And the balance is important because we don't want to be a "barebone" OS like TinyCore, either to bundle too much things and becoming bloated. So I would like to talk some details toward next release, version 0.9:

Localization

Keyboard map support will be added. And if you're interest in translating website or user interface please let me know. We're now having website translation for Portuguese and Plate in German.

Hardware Support

I'll check the latest Linux Kernel for better wireless support. The Moblin releasenote will be used as the built-in hardware list reference.

If your hardware is not supported by xPUD at this moment, don't panic. Please check the "Kernel Modules" section on the download page, and we'll try to make this process easier.

Plate UI

The user interface will come with minor improvements, for example Fullscreen Mode for application menu, Ethernet network setting, and the rest of the not yet implemented features will be filled as much as possible.

Package Manager

There will be an easy way to add extra software "plugin", manually or automatically. Too bad that I can't provide any schedule like most of the small FOSS projects, please follow me on Twitter, or subscribe on our forum for any updates. Thanks!

2009年4月4日 星期六

It's been a while since our last update, and we are really excited about this new version of xPUD, a fundamentally improved release with lots of new features, including:

Linux Kernel 2.6.28 applied with fast boot patch from Moblin, full set of tools for network configuration, a totally rewritten build system mkxpud, and our experimental user interface plate is now shipped as XUL application.

New Features:

Better hardware support

By carefully setting up udev, hotplug and ALSA, we achieved the goal to easily runs on Netbooks/MIDs. The boot up speed is even faster, and screen resolution is now auto-detected, too.

You can download the kernel modules to get full support, here's the built-in hardware list:

Much More Powerful Plate UI

The whole UI is now packed into XUL application, and we squashed in some rich client applications like transmission, mplayer and a full-featured browser that using firefox nightly build (3.6a1pre). The bitmap version of Uming font is replaced with Droid fonts, the best fonts for mobile device from Android. Also SCIM-Chewing input method is added, we can now provide multi-language support in these kind of small image.

Bunch of handy Tools

xPUD 0.8.9 comes with some network tools like ifconfig, iwconfig, wpa_supplicant for WiFi setting, wvdial for 3G connection, and ppp, dhclient for Ethernet. There is also a web-based interface that helps you getting on the Internet.

Some important tools are also included, too. For example GRUB and kexec that can boot directly from xPUD into other OS. Matchbox window manager is replaced by Openbox for better hotkey setting. You can press ALT-F2 to bring up the xterm at any time for easier debugging.

Efficient Build System: mkxpud

mkxpud is an open source project hosted on Github, it's still in the early stage of developing, and feedback are all welcomed. This is a tool wrote from scratch for xPUD project. mkxpud is an image generator, and a binary-level build system very similar to Woof of Puppy Linux.

We don't want to handle the package dependencies, so we just leverage APT/dpkg. When running mkxpud, it reads project config (called cookbook), parse it into package settings (called recipe), strips directly from a working Debian/Ubuntu Linux, extracts them into root filesystem and finally generates image.

It's very flexible, the whole rootfs can be configured by single file, also can be extended with multiple recipes. It's very efficient, too. Making an image is less then 50 seconds on my laptop, and the result is very small, as you can see, the xPUD release.

Utilities

xpud-0.8.9-mod.tgzThis is the complete modules compiled against the same kernel config, and can be put onto USB flash drive then use after booting.

xpud-0.8.9.zipBesides the default LiveCD version, here's the LiveUSB format that comes with the same boot menu.

xpud-0.8.9-rootfs.gzIf you want to customize xPUD with your own kernel, here's the root filesystem, it's a CPIO archive and GZIP compressed.

mkxpud-0.8.9.tgzThis is an export from the Git repository, contains exactly the same configuration files that builds this version of xPUD. It's been tested on Ubuntu 8.10, you can run it with ./tools/mkxpud all.

Known Issue

Kernel not build automatically

mkxpud is not finished, so the kernel image generating and module copying function is still not yet implemented.

Increased memory consumption

The system requirement is about 384MB of RAM. Because at this stage we are focused on features, haven't start optimizing on footprint and memory usage. So this issue will be addressed in the next version (0.9).

Contact Us

This project is under heavy development, and we're looking forward to any kind of feedback, please post on our Developers Forum, or contact me directly. :-)

2009年4月1日 星期三

My job progress is getting better recently, so finally I can find some free time to add new features into xPUD.

I'm about to release xPUD version 0.8.9 at the end of this week, it will be a major update compare to existing release. After a period of testing and bug fixing, version 0.9 will be released and target the average user.

If you're interested in the changelog and how it works, you may want to checkout our shining new toy mkxpud on Github first!